Artscape Daniels Launchpad Opens New Location by Quadrangle
Life as an artist requires flexibility, community, and space. And while those are often hard to come by, Toronto’s Artscape Daniels Launchpad is seeking to help. Its new location in Daniels Waterfront – City of the Arts, overlooking Lake Ontario in the city’s East Bayfront neighborhood, offers 35,000 square feet of coworking space thoughtfully put together by Quadrangle.
“The idea was to create a path for travel, gradually taking the visitor on a journey through the maker spaces,” says principal Caroline Robbie. Spaces include some 90 studios and meeting rooms within steel-framed glass storefronts, a blackbox event space, and social spaces including a kitchen and living room. The different spaces had different requirements: “There’s professional quality recording studios, which required elevated acoustics, and an active woodshop, complete with bandsaws and routers,” Robbie says. “We carefully played with the placement of these spaces to group the noisier shops together with their own acoustical slab and used suspended acoustical walls in the studios to avoid any sound transmission through the floor.”
Speaking of floors, wood reclaimed from a local high school clads the base of the board rooms, and even climbs its walls to create a cityscape—a clever example of what makers can do, when given the proper resources.
